Francis Ford Coppola
Francis Ford Coppola is an American filmmaker. One of the leading figures of the New Hollywood, Coppola is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential filmmakers in the history of cinema. Coppola is the recipient of five Academy Awards, a BAFTA Award, three Golden Globe Awards, and two Palmes d'Or, in addition to nominations for two Emmy Awards and a Grammy Award. Coppola was honored with the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award in 2010, the Kennedy Center Honors in 2024, and the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2025.
Coppola started his career directing The Rain People and co-writing Patton, the latter of which earned him and Edmund H. North the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. Coppola's reputation as a filmmaker was cemented with the release of The Godfather and The Godfather Part II which both earned Academy Awards for Best Picture, and the latter earned him Best Director. The films revolutionized the gangster genre. Coppola released the thriller The Conversation, which received the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.
His next film, the Vietnam War epic Apocalypse Now, had a notoriously lengthy and strenuous production and also won the Palme d'Or, making Coppola one of only ten filmmakers to have won the award twice. He later directed films such as The Outsiders and Rumble Fish, The Cotton Club, Peggy Sue Got Married, The Godfather Part III, Bram Stoker's Dracula, and The Rainmaker. He also produced American Graffiti, The Black Stallion, and The Secret Garden. Dissatisfied with the studio system, he transitioned to independent and experimental filmmaking with Youth Without Youth, Tetro, Twixt, and Megalopolis.
Coppola's father Carmine was a composer whose music featured in his son's films. Many of his relatives have found success in film: his sister Talia Shire is an actress, his daughter Sofia is a director, his son Roman is a screenwriter and his nephews Jason Schwartzman and Nicolas Cage are actors. Coppola resides in Napa, California, and since the 2010s has been a vintner, owning a family-branded winery of his own.
Early life and education
Francis Ford Coppola was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1939, to father Carmine Coppola, a flautist with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra and mother Italia Coppola, a family of second-generation Italian immigrants. His paternal grandparents came to the United States from Bernalda, Basilicata. His maternal grandfather, popular Italian composer Francesco Pennino, emigrated from Naples, Italy. At the time of Coppola's birth, his father was an arranger and assistant orchestra director for The Ford Sunday Evening Hour, an hour-long concert music radio series sponsored by the Ford Motor Company. Coppola was born at Henry Ford Hospital, and those two connections to Henry Ford inspired the Coppolas to choose the middle name "Ford" for their son.Francis is the middle of three children: his older brother was August Coppola, and his younger sister is actress Talia Shire.
Two years after Coppola's birth, his father was named principal flutist for the NBC Symphony Orchestra, under the baton of Arturo Toscanini, and the family moved to New York. They settled in Woodside, Queens, where Coppola spent the remainder of his childhood.
Having contracted polio as a boy, Coppola was bedridden for large periods of his childhood, during which he did homemade puppet theater productions. He developed an interest in theater after reading A Streetcar Named Desire at age 15. He created 8 mm feature films edited from home movies with titles such as The Rich Millionaire and The Lost Wallet. Although Coppola was a mediocre student, his interest in technology and engineering earned him the childhood nickname "Science". He trained initially for a career in music and became proficient in the tuba, eventually earning a music scholarship to the New York Military Academy. In all, Coppola attended 23 schools before he eventually graduated from Great Neck North High School.
He entered Hofstra University in 1955 as a theater arts major. There, he was awarded a scholarship in playwriting. This furthered his interest in directing theater, though his father disapproved and wanted him to study engineering. Coppola was profoundly impressed by Sergei Eisenstein's film October: Ten Days That Shook the World, especially the quality of its editing, and decided to pursue cinema rather than theater. He said he was influenced to become a writer by his brother August. Coppola also credits the work of Elia Kazan for influencing him as a writer and director. Coppola's classmates at Hofstra included James Caan, Lainie Kazan and radio artist Joe Frank. He later cast Kazan and Caan in his films.
While pursuing his bachelor's degree, Coppola was elected president of the university's drama group, The Green Wig, and its musical comedy club, the Kaleidoscopians. He merged the two groups into The Spectrum Players, and under his leadership, the group staged a new production each week. Coppola also founded the cinema workshop at Hofstra and contributed prolifically to the campus literary magazine. He won three D. H. Lawrence Awards for theatrical production and direction and received a Beckerman Award for his outstanding contributions to the school's theater arts division. While a graduate student, Coppola studied under professor Dorothy Arzner, whose encouragement was later acknowledged as pivotal to Coppola's career.
Career
1960–1969: Early works
After earning his theater arts degree from Hofstra in 1960, Coppola enrolled in UCLA Film School attending with Bart Patton and Pete Broadrick. There, he directed a short horror film, The Two Christophers, inspired by Edgar Allan Poe's "William Wilson" and Ayamonn the Terrible, a film about a sculptor's nightmares coming to life. He also met undergraduate film major Jim Morrison, future frontman of The Doors.In the early 1960s, Coppola made $10 per week. Looking for a way to earn some extra money, he found that many colleagues from film school made money filming erotic productions known as "nudie-cuties" or "skin flicks", which showed nudity without implying any sexual act. At 21, Coppola wrote the script for The Peeper, a short comedy film about a voyeur who tries to spy on a sensual photo shoot in the studio next to his apartment. Coppola found an interested producer, who gave him $3,000 to shoot the film. He hired Playboy Bunny Marli Renfro to play the model and had his friend Karl Schanzer play the voyeur. With The Peeper finished, Coppola found that the cartoonish aspects of the film alienated potential buyers, who did not find the 12-minute short exciting enough to screen in adult theaters.
After much rejection, Coppola received an opportunity from Premier Pictures Company, a small production company that invested in The Wide Open Spaces, an erotic western written and directed by Jerry Schafer, which had been shelved for more than a year. Both Schafer's film and The Peeper featured Renfro, so the producers paid Coppola $500 to combine the two films. After Coppola re-edited the picture, it was released as the softcore comedy Tonight for Sure. Another production company, Screen Rite Pictures, hired Coppola to do a similar job: re-cutting the German film , directed by Fritz Umgelter. Coppola added new color footage with British model June Wilkinson and other nude starlets. The re-edited film was released as The Bellboy and the Playgirls. That same year, producer/director Roger Corman hired Coppola as an assistant. Corman first tasked Coppola with dubbing and re-editing the Soviet science fiction film Nebo Zovyot, which Coppola turned into the sex-and-violence monster movie Battle Beyond the Sun. Impressed by Coppola's perseverance and dedication, Corman hired him as a dialogue director for Tower of London, sound man for The Young Racers and associate producer and one of many uncredited directors for The Terror.
Coppola's first feature film was Dementia 13. While on location in Ireland for The Young Racers, Corman persuaded Coppola to use that film's leftover funds to make a low-budget horror movie. Coppola wrote a brief draft in one night, incorporating elements from Hitchcock's Psycho, and the result impressed Corman enough to give the go-ahead. On a budget of $40,000, Coppola directed Dementia 13 over the course of nine days. The film recouped its expenses and later became a cult film among horror buffs. It was on the set of Dementia 13 that Coppola met the woman he would marry, Eleanor Jessie Neil.
In 1965, Coppola won the annual Samuel Goldwyn Award for best screenplay written by a UCLA student for Pilma, Pilma. The honor secured him a job as a scriptwriter with Seven Arts. During this time, Coppola also co-wrote the scripts for This Property Is Condemned and Is Paris Burning?. Coppola bought the rights to David Benedictus's novel You're a Big Boy Now and merged it with a story idea of his own, resulting in his UCLA thesis project You're a Big Boy Now, which earned him his Master of Fine Arts Degree from UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television in 1967. The film also received a theatrical release via Warner Bros. and earned critical acclaim.
Following the success of You're a Big Boy Now, Coppola was offered to work on an adaptation of the musical Finian's Rainbow starring dance legend Fred Astaire and Petula Clark in her first American film. Producer Jack L. Warner was not impressed by Coppola's shaggy-haired, bearded, "hippie" appearance and generally left him to his own devices. Coppola took the cast to the Napa Valley for much of the outdoor shooting, but those scenes were in sharp contrast to those filmed on a Hollywood soundstage, resulting in a disjointed look. Nonetheless, Finian's Rainbow was a critical and commercial success. The film introduced Coppola to George Lucas, who became a lifelong friend and a production assistant on his next film.
The Rain People was written, directed, and initially produced by Coppola himself, though as the movie advanced, he exceeded his budget and the studio had to underwrite the remainder of the movie. It won the Golden Shell at the 1969 San Sebastián International Film Festival. Coppola wanted to subvert the studio system, which he felt had stifled his visions, intending to produce mainstream pictures to finance off-beat projects and give first-time directors a chance. While touring Europe, Coppola was introduced to alternative filmmaking equipment and, inspired by the bohemian spirit of Lanterna Film, decided he would build a deviant studio that would conceive and implement unconventional approaches to filmmaking. He decided to name his future studio "Zoetrope" after receiving a gift of zoetropes from Mogens Scot-Hansen, founder of Lanterna Film. Upon his return home, Coppola and Lucas searched for a mansion in Marin County to house the studio. However, in 1969, with equipment flowing in and no mansion found yet, the first home for Zoetrope Studio was a warehouse in San Francisco on Folsom Street. Andrew Sarris, in The American Cinema, wrote: " is probably the first reasonably talented and sensibly adaptable directorial talent to emerge from a university curriculum in film-making ... may be heard from more decisively in the future."